dougald on black elephant
dougald hine on black elephant via his fb share:
on my way to Patmos, I came across an interview with the dancer and choreographer Akram Khan. A story he told led me into a theme that I want to write more about in future posts – about the sides of reality which haven’t been welcome at the table of modernity, the things we’re not meant to talk about if we want to be taken seriously, if we want to get invited back. It’s time to talk about these things.
Have a read of the essay and let me know where it takes you.
notes/quotes from essay:
The lasting impact of the Institute for Collapsonomics can be summed up in two words. They came out of Lloyd’s @LloydDavis mouth first, walking back from a particularly chaotic meeting: ‘I think we just encountered a new phenomenon,’ he said, ‘the Black Elephant.’
The next day, Alan and Vinay blogged about it, and when the first Dark Mountain journal came out, I introduced this creature to our readers:
The Black Elephant is an unholy union of two boardroom clichés: the Elephant in the Room, the thing which everyone knows is important, but no one will talk about; and the Black Swan, the hard-to-predict event which is outside the realm of normal expectations, but has enormous impact. The Black Elephant is an event which was quite foreseeable, which was in fact an Elephant in the Room, but which, after it happens, everyone will try to pass off as a Black Swan.
vinay gupta.. nassim nicholas taleb.. pluralistic ignorance et al
on my panel the first afternoon, I’m feeling frustrated. ‘If we were serious about the depth of the trouble the world is in,’ I say, ‘then we’d be looking for something like Alcoholics Anonymous for a whole culture!’ We’re dealing with a kind of trouble that resembles addiction, only not on the scale of individual lives, but built into a whole way of living and making sense of the world.
need 1st/most: means to undo our hierarchical listening to self/others/nature as global detox.. so we can org around legit needs
On our Friday calls, Felix talks about wanting to find a different way of gathering the world, an antidote to Davos, based around the values he has met in recovery. His inspiration is the Eranos conference that Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn created with Carl Jung and others, and he soon makes the connection to the gatherings that Ivan Illich and Valentina Borremans convened in the 1960s and 70s at the Center for Intercultural Documentation in Cuernavaca.
imagine if we listened to the itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday & used that data to connect us (tech as it could be.. ai as augmenting interconnectedness as nonjudgmental expo labeling)
Right at the start, the first time we speak, Felix tells me the name he has settled on for the project he is creating, a project which all of these things will turn out to be a part of: Black Elephant.
‘It’s when something happens and it was the Elephant in the Room, but everyone wants to pretend that it was a Black Swan.’
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I know.’
So this is how we got to Patmos. Those Humans Anonymous meetings turned into Black Elephant parades..
It’s messy, this journey. As my twelve-step friends would be the first to say, anything that has a bunch of recovering addicts at its core is going to be messy.
or not.. if we let go enough to try infinitesimal structures approaching the limit of structureless\ness and/or vice versa .. aka: ginorm/small ness
Here is the clue, then: we live in a world where miracles happen, events that are off the edge of plausibility, unless we are willing to open to the possibility that the *reality we inhabit is run through with patterns of meaning. When everything is under control and running smoothly, the way that modern civilisation has been organised, the cracks through which such patterns could break in or reveal themselves are few and far between. **As the order and predictability of our societies continues to fracture, my hunch is that we encounter more events that ought not to be possible according to the logics around which these societies have been structured.
*not sure legit free people will care about sense making ness.. patterns of meaning.. ?
**carhart-harris entropy law and virus noticings et al
I’m not talking about a *deus ex machina, a magical fix that will get us out of the mess we’re in; that kind of thinking may be common enough among those who would have us worship machines, but it’s the last thing we need. Rather, if only through desperation, I suspect that more of us will find ourselves thrown back on an openness to the strange possibilities glimpsed through the cracks. When this happens, I suspect that **we will find more substance there than the ways of seeing and knowing that we inherited could allow us to take seriously, and that this experience will matter in ways that are hard to grasp just yet, ways that are not meant to be grasped, as we learn to inhabit the world quite differently in the times to come.
*English “god from the machine”) is a plot device whereby a seemingly unsolvable problem in a story is suddenly or abruptly resolved by an unexpected and unlikely occurrence. Its function is generally to resolve an otherwise irresolvable plot situation, to surprise the audience, to bring the tale to a happy ending or act as a comedic device
yeah.. i think we’re missing it (the opp capability we now have for ie: ai as nonjudgmental expo labeling et al).. because we’re calling it ridiculous
**again.. need 1st/most: means to undo our hierarchical listening to self/others/nature ie: tech as it could be
*There are sides of life that have not been welcome at the table of modernity. Truths we are not meant to talk about, if we want to be taken seriously, if we want to get invited back. On the one side, there is the miraculous, the paradoxical patterns of meaning riddled through reality; on the other side, there’s all the many shades of shit we are not meant to name. If we’re to have a chance of relearning how to be human together, here at the end of the world as we have known it – if we’re to find ways of making life work under difficult circumstances and contribute to the possibility of regrowing a patchwork of living cultures – then I want to say that **this asks us to bring these sides of the truth back to the table once again.
*warning ness and anonymous ones heavy law ness and olivier wrong about you law et al
**will just end up in same song.. if keep obsessing/perpetuating seat at the table ness.. all that goes on there is whalespeak..oi
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be you. 